Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

H >> Harry Leon Wilson >> Somewhere in Red Gap




A blank hour elapsed. I no longer affected occupation with the flies.
Jimmie Time was irritating me. Had he not been specifically warned to
"wear 'em" full shamefully in the public eye? Was not the public eye
present, avid? Boogles I saw intermittently among beanpoles in the
garden. He appeared to putter, to have no care or system in his labour.
And at moments I noticed he was dropping all pretense of this to stand
motionless, staring intently at the shut door of the stable.

Could his fallen idol be there, I wondered? Purposefully I also watched
the door of the stable. Presently it opened slightly; then, with evident
infinite caution, it was pushed outward until it hung half yawning. A
palpitant moment we gazed, Boogles and I. Then shot from the stable
gloom an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be
the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid
clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would
be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a
wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive
vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed
to. But now the small puzzle I had thought to solve had grown to be, in
that brief space--easily under eight seconds--a mystery of enormous, of
sheerly inhuman dimensions. For the swift and winged one had been all
too plainly a correctly uniformed messenger boy of the Western Union
Telegraph Company--that blue uniform with metal buttons, with the
corded red at the trouser sides, the flat cap fronted by a badge of
nickel--unthinkable, yet there. And the speedy bearer of this scenic
investiture had been the desperate, blood-letting, two-gun bad man of
the Arrowhead.

It was a complication not to be borne with any restraint. I hastened to
stand before the shut door of the sanctuary. It slept in an unpromising
stillness. Invincibly reticent it seemed, even when the anguished face
of Jimmie Time, under that incredible cap with its nickeled badge,
wavered an instant back of the grimy window--wavered and vanished with
an effect of very stubborn finality. I would risk no defeat there. I
passed resolutely on to Boogles, who now most diligently trained up
tender young bean vines in the way they should go.

"Why does he hide in there?" I demanded in a loud, indignant voice. I
was to have no nonsense about it.

Boogles turned on me the slow, lofty, considering regard of a United
States senator submitting to photography for publication in a press that
has no respect for private rights. He lacked but a few clothes and the
portico of a capitol. Speech became immanent in him. One should not have
been surprised to hear him utter decorative words meant for the
rejoicing and incitement of voters. Yet he only said--or started to say:

"Little Sure Shot'll get that Chink yet! I tell you, now, that old boy
is sure the real Peruvian--"

This was absurdly too much. I then and there opened on Boogles, opened
flooding gates of wrath and scorn on him--for him and for his idol of
clay who, I flatly told him, could not be the real doughnuts of any
sort. As for his being the real Peruvian--Faugh!

Often I had wished to test in speech the widely alleged merits of this
vocable. I found it do all that has been claimed for it. Its effect on
Boogles was so withering that I used it repeatedly in the next three
minutes. I even faughed him twice in succession, which is very insulting
and beneficial indeed, and has a pleasant feel on the lips.

"And now then," I said, "if you don't give me the truth of this matter
here and now, one of us two is going to be mighty sorry for it."

In the early moments of my violence Boogles had protested weakly; then
he began to quiver perilously. On this I soothed him, and at the
precisely right moment I cajoled. I lured him to the bench by the corral
gate, and there I conferred costly cigarettes on him as man to man.
Discreetly then I sounded for the origins of a certain bad man who had a
way--even though they might crease him--of leaving deputy marshals where
he found them. Boogles smoked one of the cigarettes before he succumbed;
but first:

"Let me git my work," said he, and was off to the bunk house.

I observed his part in an extended parley before the door was opened to
him. He came to me on the bench a moment later, bearing a ball of
scarlet yarn, a large crochet hook of bone, and something begun in the
zephyr but as yet without form.

"I'm making the madam a red one for her birthday," he confided.

He bent his statesman's head above the task and wrought with nimble
fingers the while he talked. It was difficult, this talk of his,
scattered, fragmentary; and his mind would go from it, his voice expire
untimely. He must be prompted, recalled, questioned. His hands worked
with a very certain skill, but in his narrative he dropped stitches.
Made to pick these up, the result was still a droning monotony burdened
with many irrelevancies. I am loath to transcribe his speech. It were
better reported with an eye strictly to salience.

You may see, then--and I hope with less difficulty than I had in
seeing--Jimmie Time and Boogles on night duty at the front of the little
Western Union Office off Park Row in the far city of New York. The law
of that city is tender to the human young. Night messenger boys must be
adults. It is one of the preliminary shocks to the visitor--to ring for
the messenger boy of tradition and behold in his uniform a venerable
gentleman with perhaps a flowing white beard. I still think Jimmie Time
and Boogles were beating the law--on a technicality. Of course Jimmie
was far descended into the vale of years, and even Boogles was
forty--but adults!

It is three o'clock of a warm spring morning. The two legal adults
converse in whispers, like bad boys kept after school. They whisper so
as not to waken the manager, a blase, mature youth of twenty who sleeps
expertly in the big chair back of the railing. They whisper of the
terrific hazards and the precarious rewards of their adventurous
calling. The hazards are nearly all provided by the youngsters who come
on the day watch--hardy ruffians of sixteen or so who not only "pick on"
these two but, with sportive affectations, often rob them, when they
change from uniform to civilian attire, of any spoil the night may have
brought them. They are powerless against these aggressions. They can but
whisper their indignation.

Boogles eyed the sleeping manager.

"I struck it fine to-night, Jimmie!" he whispered. Jimmie mutely
questioned. "Got a whole case note. You know that guy over to the
newspaper office--the one that's such a tank drama--he had to send a
note up to a girl in a show that he couldn't be there."

"That tank drama? Sure, I know him. He kids me every time he's stewed."

"He kids me, too, something fierce; and he give me the case note."

"Them strong arms'll cop it on you when they get here," warned Jimmie.

"Took my collar off and hid her on the inside of it. Oh, I know tricks!"

"Chee! You're all to the Wall Street!"

"I got to look out for my stepmother, too. She'd crown me with a chair
if she thought I held out on her. Beans me about every day just for
nothing anyway."

"Don't you stand for it!"

"Yah! All right for you to talk. You're the lucky guy. You're an orphan.
S'pose you had a stepmother! I wish I was an orphan."

Jimmie swelled with the pride of orphanship.

"Yes; I'd hate to have any parents knocking me round," he said. "But if
it ain't a stepmother then it's somebody else that beans you. A guy in
this burg is always getting knocked round by somebody."

"Read some more of the novel," pleaded Boogles, to change the
distressing topic.

Jimmie drew a tattered paper romance from the pocket of his faded coat
and pushed the cap back from his seamed old forehead. It went back
easily, having been built for a larger head than his. He found the place
he had marked at the end of his previous half-hour with literature.
Boogles leaned eagerly toward him. He loved being read to. Doing it
himself was too slow and painful:

"'No,' said our hero in a clear, ringing voice; 'all your tainted gold
would not keep me here in the foul, crowded city. I must have the free,
wild life of the plains, the canter after the Texas steers, and the
fierce battles with my peers. For me the boundless, the glorious West!'"

"Chee! It must be something grand--that wild life!" interrupted
Boogles. "That's the real stuff--the cowboy and trapper on them
peraries, hunting bufflers and Injuns. I seen a film--"

Jimmie Time frowned at this. He did not like interruptions. He firmly
resumed the tale:

"With a gesture of disdain our hero waved aside the proffered gold of
the scoundrelly millionaire and dashed down the stairway of the proud
mansion to where his gallant steed, Midnight, was champing at the
hitching post. At that moment--"

Romance was snatched from the hands of Jimmie Time. The manager towered
above him.

"Ain't I told you guys not to be taking up the company's time with them
novels?" he demanded. He sternly returned to his big chair behind the
railing, where he no less sternly took up his own perusal of the
confiscated tale.

"The big stiff!" muttered Jimmie. "That's the third one he's copped on
me this week. A kid in this choint ain't got no rights! I got a good
notion to throw 'em down cold and go with the Postal people."

"Never mind! I'll blow you to an ice cream after work," consoled
Boogles.

"Ice cream!" Jimmie Time was contemptuous. "I want the free, wild life
of the boundless peraries. I want b'ar steaks br'iled on the glowing
coals of the camp fire. I want to be Little Sure Shot, trapper, scout,
and guide--"

"Next out!" yelled the manager. "Hustle now!"

Jimmie Time was next out. He hustled sullenly.

Boogles, alone, slept fitfully on his bench until the young thugs of the
day watch straggled in. Then he achieved the change of his uniform to
civilian garments, with only the accustomed minor maltreatment at the
hands of these tormentors. True, with sportive affectations--yet with
deadly intentness--they searched him for possible loot; but only his
pockets. His dollar bill, folded inside his collar, went unfound. With
assumed jauntiness he strolled from the outlaws' den and safely reached
the street.

The gilding on the castellated towers of the tallest building in the
world dazzled his blinking, foolish eyes. That was a glorious summit
which sang to the new sun, but no higher than his own elation at the
moment. Had he not come off with his dollar? He found balm and a tender
stimulus in the morning air--an air for dreams and revolt. Boogles felt
this as thousands of others must have felt it who were yet tamely
issuing from subway caverns and the Brooklyn Bridge to be wage slaves.

A block away from the office he encountered Jimmie Time, who seemed to
await him importantly. He seethed with excitement.

"I got one, too!" he called. "That tank drama he sent another note
uptown to a restaurant where a party was, and he give me a case note,
too."

He revealed it; and when Boogles withdrew his own treasure the two were
lovingly compared and admired. Nothing in all the world can be so foul
to the touch as the dollar bill that circulates in New York, but these
two were intrepidly fondled.

"I ain't going back to change," said Jimmie Time. "Them other kids would
cop it on me."

"Have some cigarettes," urged Boogies, and royally bought them--with
gilded tips, in a beautiful casket.

"I had about enough of their helling," declared Jimmie, still glowing
with a fine desperation.

They sought the William Street Tunnel under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was
cool and dark there. One might smoke and take his ease. And plan! They
sprawled on the stone pavement and smoked largely.

"Chee! If we could get out West and do all them fine things!" mused
Boogies.

"Let's!" said Jimmie Time.

"Huh!" Boogies gasped blankly at this.

"Let's beat it!"

"Chee!" said Boogies. He stared at this bolder spirit with startled
admiration.

"Me--I'm going," declared Jimmie Time stoutly, and waited.

Boogies wavered a tremulous moment.

"I'm going with you," he managed at last.

He blurted the words. They had to rush out to beat down his native
caution with quick blows.

"Listen!" said Jimmie Time impressively. "We got money enough to start.
Then we just strike out for the peraries."

"Like the guy in the story!" Boogies glowed at the adept who before his
very eyes was turning a beautiful dream into stark reality. He was
praying that his own courage to face it would endure.

"You hurry home," commanded Jimmie, "and cop an axe and all the grub you
can lay your hands on."

Boogies fell from the heights as he had feared he would.

"Aw, chee!" he said sanely. "And s'pose me stepmother gets her lamps on
me! Wouldn't she bean me? Sure she would!"

"Bind her and gag her," said Jimmie promptly. "What's one weak woman?"

"Yah! She's a hellion and you know it."

"Listen!" said Jimmie sternly. "If you're going into the wild and
lawless life of the peraries with me you got to learn to get things.
Jesse James or Morgan's men could get me that axe and that grub, and not
make one-two-three of it."

"Them guys had practice--and likely they never had to go against their
stepmothers."

"Do I go alone, then?"

"Well, now--"

"Will you or won't you?"

Boogies drew a fateful breath.

"I'll take a chance. You wait here. If I ain't back in one hour you'll
know I been murdered."

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time with the air of an outlaw chief. "Be
off at once."

Boogies was off. And Boogies was back in less than the hour with a
delectable bulging meal sack. He was trembling but radiant.

"She seen me gitting away and she yelled her head off," he gasped; "but
you bet I never stopped. I just thought of Jesse James and General
Grant, and run like hell!"

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time; and then, with a sudden gleam of the
practical, he inventoried the commissary and quartermaster supplies in
the sack. He found them to be: One hatchet; one well-used boiled
hambone; six greasy sugared crullers; four dill pickles; a bottle of
catchup; two tomatoes all but obliterated in transit; two loaves of
bread; a flatiron.

Jimmie cast the last item from him.

"Wh'd you bring that for?" he demanded.

"I don't know," confessed Boogies. "I just put it in. Mebbe I was afraid
she'd throw it at me when I was making my getaway. It'll be good for
cracking nuts if we find any on the peraries. I bet they have nuts!"

"All right, then. You can carry it if you want to, pard."

Jimmie thrust the bundle into Boogies' arms and valiantly led a
desperate way to the North River. Boogies panted under his burden as
they dodged impatient taxicabs. So they came into the maze of dock
traffic by way of Desbrosses Street. The eyes of both were lit by
adventure. Jimmie pushed through the crowd on the wharf to a ticket
office. A glimpse through a door of the huge shed had given him
inspiration. No common ferryboats for them! He had seen the stately
river steamer, _Robert Fulton_, gay with flags and bunting, awaiting the
throng of excursionists. He recklessly bought tickets. So far, so good.
A momentous start had been made.

At this very interesting point in his discourse to me, however, Boogies
began to miss explosions too frequently. From the disorderly jumble of
his narrative to this moment I believe I have brought something like the
truth; I have caused the widely scattered parts to cohere. After this I
could make little of his maunderings.

They were on the crowded boat and the boat steamed up the Hudson River;
and they disembarked at a thriving Western town--which, I gather, was
Yonkers--because Boogies feared his stepmother might trace him to this
boat, and because Jimmie Time became convinced that detectives were on
his track, wanting him for the embezzlement of a worn but still
practicable uniform of the Western Union Telegraph Company. So it was
agreed that they should take to the trackless forest, where there are
ways of throwing one's pursuers off the scent; where they would travel
by night, guided by the stars, and lay up by day, subsisting on spring
water and a little pemmican--source undisclosed. They were not going to
be taken alive--that was understood.

They hurried through the streets of this thriving Western town,
ultimately boarding an electric car--with a shrewd eye out for the
hellhounds of the law; and the car took them to the beginning of the
frontier, where they found the trackless forest. They reached the depths
of this forest after climbing a stone wall; and Jimmie Time said the
West looked good to him and that he could already smell the "b'ar steaks
br'iling."

Plain enough still, perhaps; but immediately it seemed that a princess
had for some time been sharing this great adventure. She was a beautiful
golden-haired princess, though quite small, and had flowers in her hair
and put some in the cap of Jimmie Time--behind the nickel badge--and
said she would make him her court dwarf or jester or knight, or
something; only the scout who was with her said this was rather silly
and that they had better be getting home or they knew very well what
would happen to them. But when they got lost Jimmie Time looked at this
scout's rifle and said it was a first-class rifle, and would knock an
Indian or a wild animal silly.

And the scout smoked a cigarette and got sick by it, and cried something
fierce; so they made a fire, and the princess didn't get sick when she
smoked hers, but told them a couple of bully stories, like reading in a
book, and ate every one of the greasy sugared crullers, because she was
a genuine princess, and Boogies thought at this time that maybe the
boundless West wasn't what it was cracked up to be; so, after they met
the madam, the madam said, well, if they was wanting to go out West they
might as well come along here; and they said all right--as long as they
was wanting to go out West anyway, why, they might as well come along
with her as with anybody else.

And that Chink would mighty soon find out if Little Sure Shot wasn't the
real Peruvian doughnuts, because that old murderer would sure have him
hard to find, come sundown; still, he was glad he had come along with
the madam, because back there it wasn't any job for you, account of
getting too fat for the uniform, with every one giving you the laugh
that way--and they wouldn't get you a bigger one--.

I left Boogies then, though he seemed not to know it. His needle worked
swiftly on the red one he was making for the madam, and his aimless,
random phrases seemed to flow as before; but I knew now where to apply
for the details that had been too many for his slender gift of
narrative.

At four that afternoon Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, accompanied by one
Buck Devine, a valued retainer, rode into the yard and dismounted. She
at once looked searchingly about her. Then she raised her voice, which
is a carrying voice even when not raised: "You, Jimmie Time!"

Once was enough. The door of the bunk house swung slowly open and the
disgraced one appeared in all his shameful panoply. The cap was pulled
well down over a face hopelessly embittered. The shrunken little figure
drooped.

"None of that hiding out!" admonished his judge. "You keep standing
round out here where decent folks can look at you and see what a bad
boy you are."

With a glance she identified me as one of the decent she would have
edified. Jimmie Time muttered evilly in undertones and slouched forward,
head down.

"Ain't he the hostile wretch?" called Buck Devine, who stood with the
horses. He spoke with a florid but false admiration.

Jimmie Time, snarling, turned on him: "You go to--."

I perceived that Lew Wee the night before had delicately indicated by a
mere initial letter a bad word that could fall trippingly from the lips
of Jimmie.

"Sure!" agreed Buck Devine cordially. "And say, take this here telegram
up to the corner of Broadway and Harlem; and move lively now--don't you
stop to read any of them nickel liberries."

I saw what a gentleman should do. I turned my back on the piteous figure
of Jimmie Time. I moved idly off, as if the spectacle of his ignominy
had never even briefly engaged me.

"Shoot up a good cook, will you?" said the lady grimly. "I'll give you
your needings." She followed me to the house.

On the west porch, when she had exchanged the laced boots, khaki riding
breeches, and army shirt for a most absurdly feminine house gown, we had
tea. Her nose was powdered, and her slippers were bronzed leather and
monstrous small. She mingled Scotch whiskey with the tea and drank her
first cupful from a capacious saucer.

"That fresh bunch of campers!" she began. "What you reckon they did last
night? Cut my wire fence in two places over on the west flat--yes,
sir!--had a pair of wire clippers in the whip socket. What I didn't give
'em! Say, ain't it a downright wonder I still retain my girlish
laughter?"

But then, after she had refused my made cigarette for one of her own
deft handiwork, she spoke as I wished her to:

"Yes; three years ago. Me visiting a week at the home of Mrs. W.B.
Hemingway and her husband, just outside of Yonkers, back in York State.
A very nice swell home, with a nice front yard and everything. And also
Mrs. W.B.'s sister and her little boy, visiting her from Albany, the
sister's name being Mrs. L.H. Cummins, and the boy being nine years old
and named Rupert Cummins, Junior; and very junior he was for his age,
too--I will say that. He was a perfectly handsome little boy; but you
might call him a blubberhead if you wanted to, him always being scared
silly and pestered and rough-housed out of his senses by his little girl
cousin, Margery Hemingway--Mrs. W.B.'s little girl, you understand--and
her only seven, or two years younger than Junior, but leading him round
into all kinds of musses till his own mother was that demoralized after
a couple of days she said if that Margery child was hers she'd have her
put away in some good institution.

"Of course she only told that to me, not to Margery's mother. I don't
know--mebbe she would of put her away, she was that frightened little
Margery would get Junior killed off in some horrible manner, like the
time she got him to see how high he dast jump out of the apple tree
from, or like the time she told him, one ironing day, that if he drank a
whole bowlful of starch it would make him have whiskers like his pa in
fifteen minutes. Things like that--not fatal, mebbe, but wearing.

"Well, this day come a telegram about nine A.M. for Mrs. W.B., that her
aunt, with money, is very sick in New Jersey, which is near Yonkers; so
she and Mrs. L.H. Cummins, her sister, must go to see about this
aunt--and would I stay and look after the two kids and not let them get
poisoned or killed or anything serious? And they might have to stay
overnight, because the aunt was eccentric and often thought she was
sick; but this time she might be right. She was worth all the way from
three to four hundred thousand dollars.

"So I said I'd love to stay and look after the little ones. I wanted to
stay. Shopping in New York City the day before, two bargain sales--one
being hand-embroidered Swiss waists from two-ninety-eight upward--I felt
as if a stampede of longhorns had caught me. Darned near bedfast I was!
Say, talk about the pale, weak, nervous city woman with exhausted
vitality! See 'em in action first, say I. There was a corn-fed hussy in
a plush bonnet with forget-me-nots, two hundred and thirty or forty on
the hoof, that exhausted my vitality all right--no holds barred, an arm
like first-growth hick'ry across my windpipe, and me up against a solid
pillar of structural ironwork! Once I was wrastled by a cinnamon bear
that had lately become a mother; but the poor old thing would have lost
her life with this dame after the hand-embroidereds. Gee! I was lame in
places I'd lived fifty-eight years and never knew I had.

"So off went these ladies, with Mrs. L.H. Cummins giving me special and
private warning to be sure and keep Junior well out of it in case little
mischievous Margery started anything that would be likely to kill her.
And I looked forward to a quiet day on the lounge, where I could ache in
peace and read the 'Famous Crimes of History,' which the W.B.'s had in
twelve volumes--you wouldn't have thought there was that many, would
you? I dressed soft, out of respect to my corpse, and picked out a
corking volume of these here Crimes and lay on the big lounge by an open
window where the breeze could soothe me and where I could keep tabs on
the little ones at their sports; and everything went as right as if I
had been in some A-Number-One hospital where I had ought to of been.

"Lunchtime come before I knew it; and I had mine brought to my bed of
pain by the Swede on a tray, while the kids et theirs in an orderly and
uproarious manner in the dining-room. Rupert, Junior, was dressed like
one of these boy scouts and had his air gun at the table with him, and
little Margery was telling him there was, too, fairy princes all round
in different places; and she bet she could find one any day she wanted
to. They seemed to be all safe enough, so I took up my Crimes again.
Really, ain't history the limit?--the things they done in it and got
away with--never even being arrested or fined or anything!

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